Alumnly Case Study
- Alyssa Dunn
- 12 hours ago
- 3 min read
How Alumnly Scaled Securely Across Regions with AWS and Habitat3
Background
Alumnly is a fast-growing Australian SaaS company that helps schools and universities engage, connect and grow their alumni communities. Their platform provides a private, modern online space for graduates to network, share opportunities and stay involved long after leaving campus. With a rapidly expanding customer base and increasing demand from international institutions, Alumnly was ready to take its next big step—global expansion.
The Challenge
Alumnly’s workloads were running in a single AWS region on a bespoke environment that had evolved organically as the business scaled. While this setup had served them well in their early growth phase, it lacked the structure and repeatability needed to confidently launch into new markets.
As Alumnly prepared to expand into the USA and UK, they needed:
Consistent, best-practice AWS environments that could be rapidly deployed across multiple regions.
Stronger security and governance to meet the compliance expectations of education institutions worldwide.
A foundation that would allow their engineering team to focus on product innovation, not infrastructure firefighting.
The goal was clear: build a secure, scalable and repeatable AWS footprint that could power their next stage of growth—without any disruption to their existing customers
“Alumnly wanted a platform that could scale internationally without adding complexity. By building a modern AWS Landing Zone and designing their cloud architecture in Terraform, we’ve given them a secure, best-practice blueprint that lets their team deploy new regions with confidence and speed.”
— Stuart Gravenor, Habitat3 Cloud Solutions Manager
Our Solution
Working in close partnership with Alumnly and AWS, Habitat3 deployed a secure AWS Landing Zone, evolved the existing services architecture into a more refined design and built the new architecture using Infrastructure as Code allowing for rapid deployment.
A Secure, Multi-Account AWS Landing Zone
We re-structured Alumnly’s cloud presence into a true multi-account AWS Organisation. Centralised logging, strict security guardrails and cost-management controls give their team complete visibility and confidence, while automated policies enforce governance across every region.
Infrastructure as Code for Repeatable Scale
Using Terraform, we built a reusable template that deploys Alumnly’s full cloud architecture— networking, security and application services—into any AWS region - creating a blueprint to allow for application deployment into new markets with same cloud architecture.
Highly Available, High-Performance Architecture
The new environment blends resilience with performance:
CloudFront with Origin Access Control delivers the Angular front-end securely from private S3 buckets.
AWS WAF and an Elastic Load Balancer protect and route HTTPS traffic.
Auto Scaling Groups of EC2 instances running Tomcat + NGINX handle application workloads with CPU-based scaling and automated instance refresh.
Private RDS PostgreSQL database and batch processing EC2 instances run inside secure subnets, with a bastion host for controlled admin access.
Shared S3 media storage and SES email services are accessed through private VPC endpoints for maximum security.
Outcome
Within just a few months, Alumnly moved from a single-region, hand-built environment to a fully automated, multi-region AWS platform that is secure, scalable and ready for global growth.
Their engineering team can now spin up new regions in hours, not weeks, using the Terraform blueprint.
Centralised logging, guardrails and IAM policies ensure enterprise-grade security and governance— meeting the expectations of universities and education partners worldwide.
Habitat3’s design gives Alumnly the confidence that every future deployment will match AWS best practice and remain fully supported and cost-optimised.
By partnering with Habitat3 and AWS, Alumnly has unlocked the freedom to grow internationally without sacrificing control, security or performance—laying the groundwork for the next chapter of their success story.
“Working with Habitat3 and AWS has enabled and accelerated our cloud strategy. We can now roll out new regions in hours, knowing every environment meets the same high standards for security, governance and performance—freeing our team to focus on innovating for our customers".
— Prashant Anand, CTO – Alumnly
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